An aggregated external workout programme gives employees the flexibility of choosing the type of workout they want to be involved with, ensuring larger participation.NEW DELHI: Smita Rajan, 44, recently enrolled for dancercise class initiated by her employer mobile commerce firm Paytm. After a few introductory lessons in her office in Noida the classes have now moved out to a nearby dance studio.

"We have a gym and health facilities inside the office, but there’s hardly any time to pursue structured activities within the time employees come to the office and leave. In a startup culture, it’s important to be flexible and give them the freedom to pursue fitness at places convenient to employees," says Amit Sinha, vice-president (business and people) at Paytm.

The mobile commerce firm has tied up with dance studios near its office to offer Salsa and Bachata classes to its employees, which works out to about Rs 100 per class per employee.

Startups, including Shopclues and Indegene, are increasingly tying up with gym and fitness chains and aggregators such as Gold’s Gym, FitMeIn, Fiticket and Flexipass to offer different types of fitness activities outside the office to their mostly young employees who often put in long hours and work under high pressure.

Employees at the Shopclues office in Delhi, for example, recently started to get ‘fitcoins’ from aggregator FitMeIn to try out different workouts, including Zumba classes, yoga sessions, Pilates and cross fit in gyms and studies across the national capital region.

Shopclues, which tags itself as a ‘fun, collegial, casual and high energy work place’, has so far got 30% of its employees participate in these initiatives and a lot of others have gone along with colleagues to workouts they had never explored before. Aggregators like FitMeIn, Fiticket and Flexipass say it’s not just the cost of setting up a gym inside an office but also the lack of participation they see for in-house fitness sessions that make startups and even larger corporates increasingly opt for outof-office wellness programmes.

Vishesh Goel, COO and co-founder of Delhi-based FitMeIn, said most companies have a check-box approach to fitness and organise fitness classes within the office, which see about 1% participation in most cases. An aggregated external workout programme gives employees the flexibility of choosing the type of workout they want to be involved with, ensuring larger participation.

FitMeIn, which is working with 15 startups and ecommerce companies, also counts PepsiCo among its clients.

Sachin Agarwal, senior VP for human resources at financial services group Religare, said employees can’t always possibly stick to timeslots and specific places of workout at a standard gym. "The workforce is going mobile and with that, companies must evolve too," he said. Religare has tied up with Fiticket, which offers almost 200 activities across more than 600 gyms in Mumbai.